


In the Shadow of Feeling

by spacejargon



Category: Supernatural
Genre: Angst, Explicit Sexual Content, Gen, Gore, Hurt/Comfort, Soulless Sam Winchester, Torture, Violence
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2018-05-02
Updated: 2018-05-02
Packaged: 2019-05-01 09:18:05
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,570
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14517288
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/spacejargon/pseuds/spacejargon
Summary: In the den of a monster, Dean finds himself strung up like a fish. Even worse, this monster is more human than he seems.





	In the Shadow of Feeling

The first question he’d asked, hanging from a pair of handcuffs on a meat hook, surprised him. At first, he thought nothing of it.

“So, what kind of monster are you?”

Bound and bloodied, Dean Winchester introduces himself. Not like he needed to—all  _his_  information came from loose lips and well, sloppy detective work. He’s never had a vigilante play ‘hero’ before.

It’s not an uncommon question. Really, with the screams of the women—the  _whores_ he’s butchered, it’s commonplace. Some boy, playing some stupid game of justice. That’d be the day if Dean actually managed not to slip up so poorly while trying to hunt him down.

“Ben Collings, right? Murderer and torturer extraordinaire, lemme guess.” Dean wriggles on a hook, his wrists turning a delicate shade of purple. He’s been hanging for the past couple of hours, waking up on a fishline. “You’re one sick puppy.”

Down the hall in a sealed barrel in a locked room, anguished screams stretch to greet them. Ben raises his head, eyes as cold as the night and his hair, a light shade of strawberry blond, now a dusty color from the effort it had taken to catch a certain Dean Winchester.

Ben looks up from his work on repairing a set of broken handcuffs, sitting back on a wooden stool and his toolbox on a wooden table beside him. In one hand he has a set of tweezers, hoping to salvage the pair of modified handcuffs instead of stealing some more to set up.

“Aren’t ya gonna say something? C’mon, you sick bastard, what the hell rang your bell? What’s with the bloodbath?”

His eyes are a spring-shaped green. Sweet, candy green. Ben immediately hates him. “Let’s be clear: I don’t like you. You’re not my type.”

“Not your type? Hurting my feelings.” He squirms some more and Ben watches him for a moment, taking some pleasure from a man like Dean trapped by a pair of handcuffs. “Listen, I’m not into this kinky shit, but hey, your beef’s with me. Let the girl go.”

“You keep mentioning her. Why do you care?” The cuff links jingle as the improved locks click with each notch sliding past the lock. When they click in place, he holds the cuffs, one in each hand, and tugs sharply. A few more tugs and while the chains click and snap with the force, they don’t break.

Another sharp wail interrupts him, the cuffs dangling from between his fingers as the muffled shriek carries. “What makes you think I care?”

Dean’s face twists into that of disgust. His fingers twitch, most likely on their own with the lack of oxygen. “All I’m saying is that if you keep this up, you’re getting the padded chair.  _If_  I don’t kill you first. So what’s your poison? Iron, silver, stake to the chest…?”

Ben abruptly stands, dusting off his pants as he pushes the chair back with a rough shove. Dean tenses, the reflexive movement trailing through him like mercury chasing the bottom of a wine glass. “Whatever helps you sleep at night.”

Before Dean can respond, disgruntled by the twist of his face, Ben stalks to the door and slams it open, letting the resounding bang of the metal door hitting the wood of the wall. Splinters break with a concussive force, shattering around the door’s handle before the door falls shut.

Ben’s footsteps trail off as Dean quickly throws up his body weight, trying to maneuver himself to a position where his hands aren’t numb. His shoulders ache with the strain and he’s not sure how long he’s been here.

As he tries to scale the chain hooking him above the ground, he realizes with a sinking sensation once his fingers slip that it’s covered in oil. Every chance he has to get up has him sliding back down, jerking on the chain with a heavy clanging noise as he falls back down.

Well hell, he’s probably going to die.

Sam had—Sam had gone off during the chase. They’d heard screaming and so of course, Dean went to investigate, guns blazing. Sam had called after him not to go too far since they had no idea what they were dealing with. But it’s just like that: one minute Sam’s heavy feet are crunching after him and the next there’s a bullet in his shoulder and knee and he’s waking up on a meat hook, of all places.

One cursory glance around confirms he’s not in a public place. There are no windows and it's too quiet. The walls are wooden, which means a house. With his luck, he’s in the middle of nowhere and Sam has no clue where he is.

The more ghastly realization is still there, wet and cold in the back of his throat. Sam has no soul. Sam has no reason to—

Stop that. There’s no reason to go there. Yeah, Sam’s got no soul and that’s an earth-shattering revelation that’s already been opened in another can of worms. Sam has no soul, but it’s still Sam.

Sam wouldn’t leave him.

His reverie is interrupted when a bone-rattling scream rips through the air, tailing on every last nerve overdosed on adrenaline and setting his teeth on edge. It’s much closer now when Dean hears it, wincing from the volume coming from right outside the metal door.

The door kicks open and suddenly three’s a crowd. Ben is back, his eyes empty like Sam’s but there’s a special kind of hatred there in the bitter blue of contempt. On the ground is his victim, the woman Dean had meant to protect. Her name is unknown; she's just a pretty brunette in a torn red checkered blouse and jean shorts.

Her face is streaked with makeup and tears. For a moment, her eyes lock on Dean and a helpless, pleading look hits him hard. Then Ben is grabbing her by her hair, her hands bound in an excessive amount of thick rope and a wire cord from a garrote tightened around her neck.

“Hey, leave her alone!”

He watches in horror as she’s dragged over to a stained wooden table, crying in the bloodied cloth stuffed in her mouth. She sobs when Ben’s hand reaches down her blouse, squirming in her confines with a boot sitting on her abdomen, daring her to scream.

Broken sounds, cries of  _no, please, no—_ Ben ignores them completely. Dean is impatient when her blouse is torn off, buttons flying all over the place with one sharp tug. They click and roll on the floor, leaving her shirtless.

One hand hooks under a bra strap. “Stop! Leave her alone!”

Ben tugs so hard that it snaps, the muscles of his arm twitching as the girl screams when the bra strap slaps against her skin, leaving a dark welt. She’s already covered in bruises and other marks, one looking suspiciously like a boot print where her wrist is a swollen look of broken bone crushed under the skin. Without looking up, he snaps off the other one and reaches for the clasp, leaving red lines from his fingernails in his wake.

The black bra comes off with scrapes left on her back and blood quickly welling up from the trauma. The woman screams and cries, moaning in pain in the seconds she has before there’s a muffled sound and somehow, Ben Collings has a knife.

“No, no, no—!” His protests go unheard. Her shorts and underwear come off with a heavy ripping sound. Soon she’s naked and forced to her feet in front of Dean, turned around to stare at him with wide doe brown eyes.

“Listen to me, you gotta—”

Ben tightens a hand around the back of her throat, his fingers coming around the part of her hair and up under her chin like a creeping necklace. “Keep talking and I’ll let you take her place.”

“Fine, just let her go. I don’t give a shit if you kill me.” Dean makes a point by throwing his body weight, the shudder of chains emphasizing his point. “Let her go. She hasn’t done anything.”

Ben stares at him as Dean clears his throat, trying to keep the poor woman calm as he stares at her. “I taste just as good as she does. C’mon, you’d rather eat a hunter, wouldn’t ya? Or at least kill one of us bastards. Prime opportunity right in front of you. She’s not one of us.”

Raising an eyebrow, the strawberry blond stares at him, his face pinched into a close replica of confusion. “Is that what you call yourself? A ‘hunter’?”

The realization sinks in as the woman is forced onto the table, gasping behind the cloth in her mouth. She quickly starts to scream as Ben takes her hands, hooking them above her head on a metal hook sticking out from one of the sides of the table. Her feet are quickly subdued in a similar fashion, spread apart and roped into place.

Only it doesn’t stop there. Ben disappears and Dean watches him go to his table of tools and all of a sudden he’s got a nail gun in his hand, plugging in a cord to an outlet before he’s back at the table.

“C’mon man, don’t do this! Let her go!”

Ben looks, almost fondly, at the woman when he grabs one of her feet and holds it down. Upon realizing what he’s planning to do, the woman screams and screams. The howls echo long after the sound of a nail being driven into wood and straight through flesh and bone.

The other foot follows suit and the screams echo so loudly Dean stops breathing for a solid minute.

Just to be clear, Ben lifts the gun and takes aim, firing a string of five nails into Dean’s stomach.

Blood clings to his shirt, the shock of pain wearing off quickly when Ben comes back to the woman’s side, clutching a metal pipe.

“Stop it! Kill me if you want to, but leave her out of this!”

Ben turns abruptly, as if Dean’s shout had made him rethink holding the metal pipe above the woman’s head. She sobs in the gag when Ben lowers the handheld pipe, approaching Dean like one would dangle the hide of a cow in front of a tiger.

His eyes are predatory and cold. Dean braces himself for the pipe as it rises, his eyes on the woman for as long as he can muster before the pipe swings into him like a baseball bat, driving the nails in his stomach home.

Dean gasps as blood reverses itself from his stomach, creeping up his throat in a violent burst of blood spattering all over Ben’s face while his body sways like a pinata.

A hand grabs his shoulder, fingers digging into his shirt and straight into the muscle when Ben pulls him to a stop, his fingers cutting straight into the tendons and muscles where they fall. “I told you once before;  _I don’t like you._ ”

He backs up, holding up the metal pipe in front of Dean’s eyes before he stands back, letting it fly and land with a sickening crack as Dean’s other knee shatters.

As his footsteps fade, Dean’s eyes swallowing in pools of black, a pitiful scream erupts from ten feet away.

It doesn’t stop for hours.

~

Dean Winchester, the chattiest of all his victims, has gone silent. He hasn’t spoken a word in some time, prompting the belief that perhaps he’s given up.

His eyes don’t move from the body lying on the table. Red blood oozes down the sides, left over from pools yet to have been cleaned up. Originally, Ben had thought of stapling Dean’s eyes open to make him watch, but it seems he’d underestimated the fragility of the human condition.

The worst part is Dean’s wearing a red shirt.  _Of all things..._

Sometimes the body whimpers and groans. Other times, it makes the slip-skip of muscle catching over rigid, torn tendons and veins. When he starts, his skinning knife is in his hand as he jerks up the bitch’s chin and makes the first slice. She shrieks, tossing her head back and forth until she has to be tied in place with a noose knotted around her neck like a choker when the garrote breaks. Then he takes his time, forcing her head to look at him as he gives his company a show, starting with the curve of her jawline.

All he’s done so far is mess with her. A broken finger here and there and crushing her knee caps hadn’t been much of anything. So, he decided that he wanted a captive audience and decided to stick his handheld pipe between her legs. Then shoving it as far as he could reach until the blood came running out, and that's when he’d raped her. All the while Dean had been complaining, yelling at him when a knife ran down her legs and left long bleeding lines, circling back up to her stomach to leave thick swathes of deep gashes.

Now, with her chest rising and falling rapidly after three hours at this, he grips her jaw tightly and places the blade at an angle. Dean’s hard-pressed to make a sound with nails in his gut, most likely not enough to kill him but enough to make breathing a little difficult. The pipe sticking out from the blood pooling between her legs glints in the light of the ceiling, calling to him like a shining beacon.

Dean hasn’t said a word. Ben is getting bored, so he grabs the handle of the pipe and rips it out, hearing an anguished cry in response. Brown eyes watch him, all the way up until he gets green and Dean is staring at him, ready to open his mouth and protest with his grating insistence so the pipe strikes at his jaw. The crunch of bone crackles in the air, the thunk of the pipe clamoring against the floor soon to follow.

Her whimpering and crying won’t save her, and neither will Dean’s. He sits there, his arms most likely numb and his shoulders bent out of shape with red staining red, a horrible look for a man. Disgusting, and not how he’d planned any of this to go at all.

But so much for playing it by ear—he’s got her trembling jaw and she cries, moaning behind the gag as the knife presses in and the skin starts to peel off. It trembles like a wet leaf the further he goes, cutting a stripe from her face and the gag comes free, splashing in blood collecting at his feet.

Her screams are piercingly loud. He leans in close, stopping as she screams herself hoarse. “Look at you,” his fingers tug on the flap of skin cut from her face, hanging limply in between his thumb and forefinger. In the light, hundreds of cuts all over her glisten and crust over in the open air. He leans in close, smothering her mouth and nose to cut the noise.

“You’re  _disgusting.”_  And then he reaches back to tug the noose, cutting off the next scream as he begins again with his work. Her skin comes in one long flake, wet with the red that bubbles up underneath and streaks into her hair.

Her breasts, once a milky white now stained with red cuts tipped at the nipples, arouse him. But then the arousal is replaced with disgust and he’s off to his tool box to grab a wire noose, hearing the sack of flesh mewl and plead in a choked off string of moans. Disgusting, really.

“Stop it!  _Stop!_ ”

So much for silence.

When he returns, the wire noose slips neatly over one breast as he stares into her eyes. Her eyes are as wide as saucers and the color of dried blood and with a one-two slip and rip, the breasts come off with a tightening of a cord.

This one held out the longest. An impressive feat of three hours. Of course, he’d paced himself. Took his time in getting this far to hear the choked gurgle of moans as she weeps trails of mascara and smudged black. But now she’s fading fast from the blood pouring like rain from the gaping wounds in her chest, the skin of her breasts clinging wetly in place by thicker muscles that don’t give for the wire as blood splatters on the floor with the thickness of a heavy rainstorm.

With a heavy hand he retrieves his skinning knife and takes it to the jagged edge of her face, continuing to cut as his mouth runs dry. Her skin peels and the choking grows louder, more insistent as he reaches her scalp with his knife. She slowly starts to die, blood squeezing from the corners of her white lips and leaving ruby trails.

Except it’s not that easy. It’s never that easy and in a bubble of rage rising from deep within, he takes his skinning knife and stabs it straight through her chest, the force clipping a rib and driving the knife straight into her heart.

Her eyes gloss over like foggy windows when she stops breathing. Her chest stops mid breath, deflating like a limp balloon. The handle of the skinning knife stands at attention, Ben breathing harshly as the rush of excitement begins and ends just like that.

It’s over.

He turns back to Dean with a sharp, prickling sensation in the back of his head that he’s shared his routine with a complete stranger. It angers and sickens him, especially with Dean wearing a color that’s only reserved for the whores that end up here in his home.

In all, the whole process bothers him. He had been wanting to test something out and with the arrival of Dean Winchester, private enemy number one, all of his plans would have to be redrawn.

Taking his time would have to wait to the next bitch. One involving the break of the human mind, down to its very core once stripped by torture.

He hates Dean, watching him hang there by his wrists like a gutted fish, blood trickling down his shirt and the disgust fills him like a strong drink. The downpour of blood begins to quieten and leaves his thoughts open and vulnerable with how thunderous they are inside his head. Tools discarded, he goes to grab a bone saw hanging on the wall.

Long after the sounds of sawing through bone begin, Dean is remarkably quiet. His stare is a thousand yards long as he hangs, his wrists black and sections of meat left to rot and brown on the wooden table. There’s little left to do now except watch the blood dribble, red leaking off the sides of the table and coating it like a picnic cloth.

He watches with intrigue while he cuts. The red stirs him up and calms him all at once, laying down a layer of wax over frayed nerves, neurons firing off with no discretion. He’s on a foot that had an anklet hanging from it, the limb dangling from a tendon. The saw is put aside for the rest to be cut right off with the help of some pliers. It splashes in a growing pool of blood that circles a hair-clogged drain.

His arms are stained with blood along with a large portion of his blue flannel shirt. Red is the opposite of blue. The blood staining his shirt turns into dark purple splotches, staining like red wine on a thick white carpet with the musk of copper.

Satisfied as he is with the sawed-off bone exposed to the fresh air by his handiwork, his eyes wander still, crawling back up to the breasts. With a hint of a thought he moves away from her foot to the other side of the table, letting nothing be obscured by him when he leans over the table and grips the left breast by the nipple and tugs it upright.

The saw comes to the root of the muscle and starts to gnaw through with an even sawing pace. With some spurts of blood released from the pressure of his arm resting on the graying flesh, he cuts through it patiently until it pulls free.

He does the same to the other but his eyes do not stay on target. They roam to Dean with his stare, matching it with a glare of his own as the other comes free. When he sets down the saw, dulled by his beginning work, he drops the saw with a loud clang.

He holds up the sacks of flesh like a pair of blood-soaked rabbits in each hand for Dean to see.

Something changes in Dean’s eyes right then and there. His eyes narrow, almost imperceptible and it would be to someone who wasn’t a predator like him. He’s no longer staring at the body but Ben, with his eyes narrowed in a cold, dark, soulless rage. He sits there, broken jaw and all and a cripple by all means, and has the audacity to give such a hateful stare.

“Am I the kind of monster you expected?” He squeezes the breasts in his hands, the wet squelch of blood like a waxy covering over his fingers. “I  _hate_ you.”

Dean’s eyes dismiss him. He can tell that much and it brings a bubble of black rage from him, spewing forth when all pleasure derived from his latest trapping leeches out of him.

Ben’s heavy footsteps come toward him and one minute he’s in the air, the next on the ground, collapsing like a sack of potatoes. Ones that have embedded nails and broken bones that squeeze the breath out of him with his jaw clicking uselessly into place.

“I can’t let you go that easily,” his voice slides over the careful steps around Dean’s blood pooling on the floor. “You  _ruined_ her before I had a chance to enjoy her. Then you mock me, wearing that.”

A hand fists itself in Dean’s collar and jerks him upright, nails scraping inside him. Ben’s eyes come down, looking down upon him as he moves in close enough to taste the acrid breath of a murderer.

His lips curl back into a snarl. “And now, I want my revenge.”

~

Dean gasps like a fish on land, gurgling on blood and dry heaves that turn wet and splatter. Shouts follow after him, clenched like fists of rage with how explosive they sound. The noise rebounds and echoes off the walls, ricocheting to the slip of silver drawn in the shape of a gun.

Sam presses himself against the wall, listening to the sounds of muffled ranting.

Behind the walls where Sam has himself hidden, Dean is on the ground as he often finds himself to be, blood smeared over him like a ritual sacrifice and who knows how much of it is his. The madman in front of him takes only pleasure when he first starts, simply with kicking him all over to vent his frustration.

But then he’d moved onto bigger things. Like ripping out the nails caught in Dean’s flesh and stapling the wounds shut. Dean spat at him in spite, blood splattering on Ben’s face like an explosive mural.

“Having fun yet?” he asks, squatting over Dean with a jug of salt water in his hand. Dean’s recovering from throwing up his most recent waterboarding. That, except minus the cloth over his face and blood coming up along with bile and the water that had burned going down. “Are you enjoying what you’ve done?”

He doesn’t get a chance to answer before he meets a sucker punch to the gut and he’s spitting up blood and mucus again. It sticks in his throat when his neck jerks, burning fire out his mouth and nose when he’s dropped to the floor once again.

“By your luck, you won’t live to see the light of day.” A pocket knife makes an appearance in Ben’s hand, tilting up as it catches on Dean’s shirt and cuts through it, straight to his chin. Dean stares him down as the red shirt is cut off of him, only to be thrown away in disgust as a growl sets in the air.

A heavy thump from beyond them catches Ben’s attention. In a split second his eyes narrow and every muscle becomes rigid as he pulls himself up, slowly rising to his feet. He steps away from Dean and quietly treks over to his tool bench, the click of a gun loading piercing the silence.

With his eyes toward the door, he steps back over to Dean, pointing his own Colt at his head. The silver catches in the light, hanging on the irony of it all.

“You’ve found your way here. What kind of ‘hunter’ is caught by a predator?” Ben’s eyes are cold, lifeless. “You’re hardly a man, Dean Winchester. A shell of one. No better than the whores I find on the streets.”

Dean stares, motionless save for the set of his eyes on the muzzle of the gun. Not a word comes from him, though it’s most likely due to the purple bruises wrapped around his throat.

Loading a bullet into the chamber, Ben Collings takes aim at the point between Dean’s eyes, eyes as dark as the depths of hell.

A shot fires following the sound of a click, most definitely of a lock being picked going by Dean’s fine-tuned hearing. Then the blast of a gunshot deafens him, as if being submerged underwater again.

Except there’s no hand holding him down in a bucket of blood and ice cold water. There’s a jerk against his leg and suddenly a muffled thump and crash, the skitter of a gun chased by quick footsteps.

“Dean, Dean!” Sam’s on him then, grabbing him from his spot on the floor while trying to sit him upright. Dean takes longer to focus, eyes bleary and blood stinging in his nose when he gets an eyeful of Sam and no one else.

Ben Collings is gone—Dean forgets to ask when Sam cuts his hands free and they spring forward from behind his back, his arms purple and his hands a fragile shade of broken, mottled with black and blue. Sam pays no attention to it and the pressing issue, talking to him but his words don’t make sense, just a bunch of noise buzzing in Dean’s ears.

When Sam tries to get Dean to stand, his brother collapses underneath him. He watches in distinct consideration, trying to judge Dean’s injuries when he braces himself for Dean’s weight. Dean grunts against him, unable to stay upright as Sam reconsiders his options.

There’s only one way in and out and there’s no telling where the guy is—he’s at the end of his rope, now with Dean crippled and unresponsive and it’s unlikely they’ll both get out alive at this rate.

He grunts, trying to reassure Dean in the least unaffected way he can, which is a stretch. Then he closes his eyes and thinks hard at Castiel.

Dean’s eyes glaze over. “Dean? Dean, can you hear me?” Nothing elicits a response.

“Castiel, it’s Sam. Dean’s going to die.”

A crack of thunder rumbles from outside.

**Author's Note:**

> Do you have no soul? It's like it died long ago.
> 
> Thank you for reading.


End file.
